Disclaimer: I do not own Eyeshield 21.
Author's Note: Points to whoever gets the reference when Mamori makes Banba...let out a painful note.
Long Pass: Declaration
"Let's get one thing straight, Hiruma Yoichi," she said, stabbing him in the chest with her finger.
Hiruma had gotten a little too pyrotechnic-happy. But Mamori, swept up in the excitement (and perhaps too inured to the excess use of explosives by then), hadn't argued against it as much as she should have, so it was probably as much her fault as his.
Every fall, the Tokyo colleges had festivals. Naturally they competed against each other for the one with the most variety, and highest attendance. The American Football teams in particular tried to outdo each other in their haunted houses, but Enma, Ojou, Saikyodai and Takekura (which wasn't even a college) kicked things up a notch.
The winner's team got taken to dinner on the other colleges' dime, and, with eaters like Kurita and Gaou in the mix, the prize was worth a fair chunk of change. Saikyodai had narrowly lost to Enma the previous year, which did not sit well with hypercompetitive Hiruma-who knew that Kurita, as cuddly as a giant chestnut-headed teddy bear, had a surprisingly sinister streak when it came to designing haunted houses? The fucking fattie had even the gall to tearfully cite Hiruma's terrifying influence as the key inspiration when awarded the trophy.
Hiruma, being Hiruma, assumed that the previous year's house didn't have bullets and bombs in it. Mamori prevented him from going too overboard-nixing the exploding floor and roof in the same room-but he made up for it with extra fireworks. The Saikyodai student body was in permanent shuddering status from the quarterback's sinister cackling during the week they spent building the complex on the football field.
All the efforts seemed to pay off. By the last day of the festival, Saikyodai's attendance numbers were the clear leader as word of mouth spread about the terrifying contents of the haunted house. The FX were top notch (rumor was that Hiruma had blackmailed a couple of Hollywood crews to help) and given an extra chilling psychological fillip with an addition of the FEAR ROOM, which supposedly was tailored to attack each person's worst fears (perhaps not so supposedly, given Hiruma's Threat Book).
Except, in the back where no one had noticed given the rest of the props in front of it, one of the pyrotechnic installations began sparking erratically. As the night wore on, it got worse and worse until the last couple of hours a particularly high arcing spark hit the wall...and the very flammable spray painted props.
It still took some time for people to notice, given that it was already quite hot inside and the aforementioned intentional fireworks, but after they did it wasn't long before people realized that the "Fires of Hell" weren't supposed to melt all the devils too, and the roof wasn't supposed to flame up like that. Soon people were streaming outside, coughing in the smoke. Luckily, since it was towards the end of the night on the last day, there wasn't too many people inside anyway. Mamori came up with the right numbers when she counted the customers against the sign-in sheet at the entrance. Then she started on the players working that night. Except...
"Where's Yoichi?"
Ikkyu, dressed like an evil Buddhist monk, looked at Banba, dressed as a troll. "Wasn't he behind you?"
The lineman shook his head. "No..."
Contrary to the flames at her back, Mamori felt an icy claw close over her heart.
"I saw him working in the Fifth Ring room before the fire started," Yamato offered. He was dressed like zombie. "Taka, you were in the Sixth Ring. Did you see him on your way out?"
Taka, a vampire, shook his head after a moment. Mamori spun around to face the building.
Banba grabbed her arm. "I'm sure he's fine, he's probably lost in the crowd somewhere-"
"Have you ever known Yoichi to be just lost in the crowd?" Mamori demanded. Her heart was pounding in her ears. He was in there, he was lost, he was unconscious, he was in danger, he was burning, he was-
"Calm down! You can't run in there-just count people again-"
"I counted everyone twice!" Mamori said, struggling, but Banba's grip was formidable.
"You can't run in there! Wait until the fire crews get here-"
"It'll be too late by then!" Mamori could already hear the sirens in the distance, but that was just it. They were in the distance. Unable to pull free, in quick succession the dainty football manager sank a fist into his solar plexus, slammed her foot into his instep, landed a punch on his nose and kneed him in the groin. As soon as Banba let go of her to collapse in a very painful ball, she ran into the burning building.
Well...shit.
Hiruma looked around. He always figured that he might burn in hell one day-he just didn't figure that day to be today.
Hiruma had been in one of the middle rooms of the maze-like haunted house, and so had been trapped between the people from the back racing out and the people in front still blithely going forward. After it became clear what was going on, a stampede ensued. Someone stomped on his foot and knocked him backward. By the time he clawed his way out of the crumpled display to rain bullets on the asshole, everyone had gone and the topography of the interior had changed so much that he was no longer sure he knew which way was out.
Ok, fine. He wasn't going to panic. Hiruma Yoichi did not fucking panic. He had dealt with worse shit before, after all. He couldn't think of any right now, but that did not mean that he hadn't.
Reasoning that if he knocked through enough walls, eventually he would get outside (they were only made out of cheap presswood and cardboard anyway), he started slamming his trusty rifle butt into things. He got scorched a couple of times but the fire actually helped weaken the walls so this wasn't a half-bad plan. The only problem was the smoke was making him cough and his eyes water, and the heat was causing his gun to slip from his sweaty grip. After the second wall, he had to lean against his gun, hacking and wheezing as the world spun, and trying not to vomit.
Dammit. He pulled up his shirt to cover his nose and mouth, but it didn't really help. That's when he had the terribly ironic thought that the Devil was going to die burning. Fitting, though he'd rather not die at all. Mamori was going to be so mad...
"Yoichi!"
Great, now he was hearing things. He coughed again.
"Yoichi! Where are you? YOICHI!"
Eyes running, Hiruma squinted through the flames. "Mamori?"
"Yoichi!" Ends of her hair crisping, his girlfriend ran toward him through a fiery hallway.
Shit, tell me I'm fucking hallucinating. "Mamori, what the fuck are you doing here?" he demanded.
"Yoichi, what are you doing here?" Mamori snapped back. "Why didn't you get out with the others?"
"Why the fuck did you run back inside?"
"Because you weren't outside!" She grabbed an arm and began hauling him down the hall.
The ceiling in the room behind them collapsed and the one in the room ahead seemed perilously close to it. "That doesn't make a shit's worth of sense!" he yelled at her, trying to pull his arm free. "Get out!"
"Not without you!" Mamori screamed back.
Hiruma drew breath to respond but instead succumbed to a fit of coughing so bad he thought he'd vomit one of his lungs out. The room started to waver, and Mamori caught him as he fell. "Get the fuck out," he repeated when he could speak again, and pushed her away. "I'm not-"
"Don't you dare! I refuse to-watch out!"
The ceiling lost the fight against gravity and a support beam swung solidly into Mamori's head as she pushed him out of the way.
Hiruma stared. "You've got to be fucking kidding me. Mamori?" He reached out a shaking hand to touch her. She didn't move, blood from her temple running over her eyes.
"Mamori!" he yelled, but his shaking fingers couldn't find her pulse. Hiruma promptly stopped thinking, because to think was to think that and he couldn't think that because if he did that meant his fucking stupid, brave, sweet, idiotic Mamori had run into a fire to save his worthless ass for nothing and he'd lost her and if he lost her that he might as well be nothing, and-
Well. Fuck this. Hiruma looked around, and then felt something round in his pocket that he had forgotten about, since he carried it with him every day. He pulled out the mini-grenade and, despite the heat, the flames and the smoke searing his lungs, grinned evilly.
The Devil may die burning, but the hell if his Angel was going to.
Mamori woke to someone screaming her name.
"Yoichi?" she said weakly, recognizing his voice even at excess decibels. She sat up and coughed, feeling gritty astroturf under her fingers, and stared at the hole in the side wall of the now barely recognizable haunted house. Wincing at the pain, she touched her temple and then stared at the blood on her fingers.
Hiruma was looking at her with wide saucer eyes. "Mamori?"
"Yoichi, what happened?" He was covered in sweat and dirt and the edges of his clothes were singed. The blue eyes were rimed with red and Mamori thought that this was probably one of the few times she could remember that his hair wasn't trying to defy gravity. "Are you okay?"
"Am I...?" His voice rose about 12 octaves in incredulity, before she was abruptly crushed to his chest as he wrapped his arms around her so tight she thought she would pop.
"Yoichi?"
"Don't you ever, ever do that again," he whispered, and something wet slid down her neck. His entire body was shaking. "Not fucking ever."
"But I couldn't leave you," she whispered back.
"You could have fucking died," he whispered again. Her boyfriend shook even harder, and his grip tightened, if that was at all possible.
"But I didn't. I'm fine," she told him, though she really wasn't. Her eyes burned, her throat ached, and her head pounded. "I'm fine," she insisted, and pried his face away so she could see it.
"You are fucking not," he snapped, but his fingers gently touched the side of her head. Then he grabbed her shoulders and started shouting at her. "Why did you do that? What were you thinking? Were you thinking? Why would do you something so fucking stupid? You should have stayed outside! I've never met anyone so fucking stupid in my entire fucking life!"
"But you were inside!" she protested, wincing. The shouting wasn't doing wonders for her throbbing head. "What did you expect me to do?"
"Leave me, not run in like a fucking dumbass! You could have died, you fucking hear me? You could have fucking died!"
Behind him, their teammates started to reach for the quarterback to tell him to calm down. He turned on them like a whip. "Shut the fuck up!"
"Yoichi, I-" Mamori started, more than a little rattled. She'd never seen him this angry. Actually, she had never seen him angry ever. Hiruma didn't get angry, he got even. He'd never exploded like this.
"You!" He rounded on her again, fingers biting into her shoulders and face flushing. "You! Agh! Goddamnit!"
Another first, she thought vaguely. She'd never seen him at a loss for words either.
It wasn't long after that when the firemen finally arrived and the paramedics bustled both her and Yoichi off to the hospital for treatment for smoke inhalation, burns, and Mamori's head. Before they left the field, Mamori waved the rest of the team off to their own homes with promises to their worried faces that she would call them first thing in the morning with an update. Yoichi, despite managing to regain his outward calm, was like a lid on a heavily simmering pot although he contented himself with threatening the hospital staff with grievous bodily harm and heavy gunfire if they didn't treat her first. He also refused to let go of her hand when they tried to make him go to a separate room to look after him.
Later, when they were left alone, Hiruma kept staring at the bandage on Mamori's head like…well, she wasn't sure what it was like, but it made her feel like she had stepped on a kitten.
"I look kind of like you after you got hit by the ball by Ken-chan in high school, don't I?" she said.
He snorted, but didn't smile. "You shouldn't have come after me, Mamori."
Okay. Mamori scowled at him. "What, and leave you to die?"
"Well, fucking yeah—"
"Let's get one thing straight, Hiruma Yoichi," she said, stabbing him in the chest with her finger. "I'm sorry for scaring you, I'm sorry for making you worry, but I am not sorry for coming after you. I love you. I love you more than I have ever loved or ever will love anyone else, ever. I will walk through ice and snow and rain and flying knives and a hail of bullets and yes fire if it meant keeping you in my world. You might not like it, but that's not your decision to make. Understand?"
He stared at her, speechless for the second time that night. She poked him again.
"Understand?"
His lips suddenly curved in that trademark grin. "You love me?"
Mamori's mouth dropped open. "What? Of course I do! Why do you think I put up with you?"
"Well, you never actually said it—"
She grabbed the pillow from the bed and hit him with it. "I don't believe you!"
He cackled as he fended off the blows. "Kekekeke!"
"Besides, you never said it to me either!"
"What? Oh fuck, I haven't?" He let the pillow collide with him once before grabbing it and stealing Mamori's breath with a kiss. Afterwards he grinned into her startled face. "Guess I say it in my head so fucking often that I forgot to do it out loud."
She blew a strand of hair from her face. "Hmph."
"But seriously, don't fucking do that again because I'll have a fucking heart attack."
She rolled her eyes. "Then don't get yourself into trouble. I nearly had a heart attack when I realized you were still inside, you know."
"Did you really nut Banba?"
She looked embarrassed. "Well, I took that self-defense class with Suzuna last week...and I panicked."
"Kekeke!" He kissed her again. "I love you, Anezaki Mamori."
She kissed him back. "I love you, Hiruma Yoichi."